…literary tomfoolery and other nonsensical musings…

…fuck Time Warner Cable

Seriously. Fuck it hard with shards of glass and sand.

I don’t ask for much out of life. All that I really need is a little financial security, a happy and healthy toddler, a home with Tiffany lighting and an internet connection that doesn’t suck greasy, hairy ass.

I’m woefully addicted to connectivity. I go through withdrawal if we lose power and my iPhone battery runs out of juice. I shake. It’s worse than going without a cigarette, in certain ways. That said it’s not just a consistent internet connection to me. It’s my livelihood since I work out of my home.

Years ago, I was able to work off-line. Since I transitioned to my new position last year, I no longer have the luxury of keeping things on my own desktop as I work with patient data which must be double-sooper-seekrit encrypted in llama and wingdings. Trying to download and upload any document is a complete pain in the ass on a good day. When the size of the file is the cyber equivalent of the entire State of North Carolina, the task is odious. The process takes so damn long that I’m able to empty and reload the dishwasher and do laundry.

While I appreciate being able to multi-task like no other, I am far too impatient for this madness. Around middle-March, I upgraded my service to uber-maximum-light speed performance. Or so I thought. Our service may be faster but I wouldn’t know as I am now unable to maintain a connection for longer than a mouse fart.

After sitting on the phone with the diagnostic staff stationed in, oh let’s say Bangalore, they finally agreed that it’s an actual physical problem. Being the nice folks that they are, they agreed to dispatch a technician to make some repairs.

The technician showed up in a torrential downpour with a surly attitude. I suppose I’m having flashbacks from all of the acid I did not drop in college because he made us believe that the problem is in our heads. My seven years of living in this house and dealing with the same fucking problem over and over and over again did not matter. Jesus could be standing next to me, explaining the problem to the tech and I would still be wrong. Oh. And going to hell, too.

After slamming my head off the wall and hopping up and down in the foyer (not really), I finally convinced the surly tech that the problem is, indeed, with the actual cable running to the home. Yay! Unfortunately, surly tech did not bring the appropriate equipment to make such repairs. Our only recourse is to schedule another appointment.

I can certainly appreciate the fact that not everyone is a prognosticator and not everyone will bring every fucking tool in the shop to a service call. What I do not appreciate is paying for an upgrade and receiving a downgrade or a no-grade.

So, again, I will have to call Time Warner and sit on eternal rot with Bangalore to have the same surly tech dispatched to the home where I will have the same irritating conversation about what is actually wrong. Because, you see, I have an infinite amount of time to spend on this issue. I will end up dropping to my knees, with tears streaming down my face and pleading with someone who couldn’t give a flying fuck that the problem is not with the router. It’s not with the modem. It’s with that tangled up mess of a cable outside of the house. In short – it’s not me. It’s YOU! It’s you and your shitty cable that does not deliver a consistent bleep-blip-bloop signal to my damn house, Time Warner.

In the interim, I will spend, at the very least, ten minutes trying to access my WLAN to spend an additional ten minutes trying to upload a document. Then I will spend an additional ten minutes trying to explain to my boss why it takes me twenty minutes to complete the simplest of actions.

That is such a royal pain in the ass there Marnie!! I have been very lucky with my net connection. I can really understand your getting mad at TW. I have a problem with my bd rom right now. I have called Sony about 4 times before they finally said, oh it must be a hardware problem. I kinda figured that out on the 2nd call there folks. But they were super awesome though, so I can’t fault them for it.

I remember having a similar problem with Comhem about a year ago. We had upgraded our broadband service to the highest speed Comhem had available, but instead of webpages loading in milliseconds, as they should have done, it was taking FOREVER. By the time the damn thing actually loaded, I’d lost my will to live.

Why the fuck, I asked myself at the time, are we paying all this money for basically dial-up speeds? The problem was almost worse than them trying to fob it off as our fault. It definitely wasn’t our fault. They freely admitted that it was their fault. They needed to upgrade some wiring in our area and would get to us as soon as they could.

Oh. My. God.

I almost blew a blood vessel during those weeks it took for them to “get to us.”

I can’t believe so many people still put up with this kind of drama and headaches from their TV provider. You have choices, people! Do research! Do what I did…four years ago I slung off the shackles and binds of cable once and for all and experienced television freedom for the first time through DISH Network. Lower prices, more channels, sick HD! Even before I was an employee of the company I was recommending the service to family members and friends, and I wouldn’t recommend something to ANYONE, let alone my Grandma, unless I personally used and loved the service. Such is the case with DISH.